>> Also, you have many of the same products selling at the same time by many different sellers <<

Each HBD FA is unique. Nothing like the example you're trying to use. So would it be fair to ignore everythIng else you wrote? If you want to use an example of an eBay auction for a unique item, you might make some interesting & relevant points.

1) HBD is dying. Many people who leave the game leave because it takes too much time. There would be a benefit in changing FA bidding so it remains strategic, fun, AND takes less time. More people would stick with the game if it took less time to play. -- Agree or Disagree?

Disagree. I do not believe that many people leave because of the time.There are many many reason why people leave and yes the time might be one of the reason but not the main reason or primary reason. FA really doesn't take that much time. Owner can be just fine checking in twice a day for five minutes and adjust the bids as needed.

(2) The current system rewards the ability to check in every 4 hours, 365 days a year, over all else by a LOT. Not everyone can do that. For every person who can do that, and would like to play HBD, there are probably 10-100 that can't invest the time to compete 24/7/365. There is of course a strategy to the current system. But there are other systems that also have strategies, that reward smart play, AND that would take a whole lot less time than the current system. -- Agree or Disagree?

Disagree. The Contract offers are blind so you don't know(For sure) what the bids are. I could be off by millions or ten buck. I dont know(maybe) for sure. I have to guess and make adjustment to my offer. During FA I Check in during the same cycles as I do during the season. I pop in through out the day Monday through Friday and I don't do Much over the weekends. I do Just fine in FA and have never felt cheated because of how much or little I have checked in.

(3) Real time is the way the internet works. Batching up instructions and getting feedback hours later (that you have to go get -- it's not even sent to you) is a model that exists, rounding off, nowhere else on the internet. Many people won't or can't interact with a game that way. But none of that matters. There is no way HBD FA bidding could ever have real time feedback with more complete information. Sure, it works on every other website, but it's just not possible in HBD. -- Agree or Disagree?What? I agree that the internet works in real time just like my watch. I disagree that real time would work in HBD FA. How is your real time bidding any different the the current mode? I start my day set my prices and leave when I have the number one bid. Ten Hours later I come back and see that I am either still number one or need to adjust my bid. Yes, now you're not sure if you have the top offer but it is about the same.

(4) The HBD FA bidding system exists, rounding off, nowhere else, online or offline. Make a blind bid. Never know the current top bid, so you're always bidding blind. Go out of your way a few hours later to find out what little info you can get. Repeat. Arbitrarily, at some point, a winner is declared. No fixed set of rules. As this model is unique, it stands to reason that is it either brilliant and a whole new way to hold an effective & efficient auction, or crap idea that successful businesses of all types have stayed away from . Closer to what end of the scale do you think it sits?

Well thanks to you, we know now the HBD FA in indeed not an auction. I bet is you look into MLB FA you might find a closer match.

(5) Years of proof that GMs will, in the current system, bid what many experienced GMs would agree is way too much for a player. That player, or a comparable player could have been had for less. The HBD-proven result of this is GMs quit their team or HBD. Leaving harder to fill teams behind. You're saying you think this is ether good for HBD, or it's the only way it could ever work. Like gravity, it's just part of the way it is & we have to live with it. Change is not good idea or possible. -- Agree or Disagree

Changes and improvments should alway looked at and given reasonable thought. Yes it sucks getting stuck with a bad contract but it happens.

unsub - Thanks. I disagree with some of what you've written, but I appreciate you took a few minutes to break it down to the details.

Your counter points demonstrate the main point I'm trying to make - it takes logging in several times a day, every day, even if nothing happen, because you don't know until you log in, to compete in HBD. And you left out that there's one 4 hour period where the top bid is accepted. Miss that one 4 hour period & you miss some good FAs. I think there could be other ways. You've done a good job of backing up my point with your examples, but I get that the way it works now works well for you.

As for (1), I've asked a lot of people who had played a few season why they are dropping teams. Takes too much time is by far the most common reply. I haven't surveyed the thousands of people who have tried HBD and left, so I can't give you an exact percentage. I have a strong hunch, based on a sample of data, it's a big factor.

unsub - "How is that good for the Seller to only get 60% of what I was willing to pay?"

I think you nailed the main difference you & I have on this general topic.

I think it's best for HBD to change so it's a better game for humans to play. Real people. Like you and me. The more the better.

You think it's best for HBD if the pretend players make the most pretend money every pretend season. How real people are impacted doesn't enter into your thinking.

Honestly, I've got nowhere to go with that. You win. You love the pretend player & I don't.

The game will keep spitting out pretend players. They don't get better or worse, or try harder or not, depending on how much they get paid. The pretend players don't know how much pretend money they are being paid to play pretend baseball.

You don't have to answer this, but I'll feel better asking --- You do know the players are pretend, right? And you're not really given $180 million to spend?

Posted by unsub on 10/23/2012 2:32:00 PM (view original):Is it fair to ask you in FA who you think is the Seller? Because you seem to have no clue. Also if you figure out who the seller is, why would it be bad for the seller to get overpaid?

Interesting question. I don't think it matters for anything I've brought up, but maybe it does & I'm missing it.

The Seller in the FA system (current or anything like I've proposed) is the WIS, or maybe HBD.

We pay them (real) money to play. They then give us 180 million tokens to use in a game. The tokens have no value outside the game, and are only good for 1 season. One of the ways we can use the tokens is in an auction for FAs, which WIS presents to us.

Here's a real world example / analogy - This is a common fundraiser model. People pay (real) money to go to a dinner or event. When they get there, they are given some amount of play money. It's not good outside the room. And you can't save it until next year's event and use it then. They charity (the people we gave our (real) money to) hold an auction at the event. Some number of items are put up for bid. People bid with the play money. Winner gets the thing. Repeat until they are out of stuff to action off.

The minor details would obviously be different in HBD and a dinner, but the same word is used In both cases, it's called an "auction".

Depends on how far you're thinking ahead, you are both correct in theory and wrong in theory & practice.

If the auction was a one-time thing. Sell this one thing, one-time, and the auction house/process goes away, never to hold another auction, and the seller and none of the bidder are ever expected or able to return, you are correct. eBay's model will, on average, if you run the model over & over again, make that seller less money than other auction systems.

If the auction process/house is an ongoing enterprise, where the seller would likely come back to sell something else someday and bidders would likely return again to bid on other items, eBay's model, over the long haul, makes the most money for the seller. That's why they do it that way. That's why they make their money by taking a cut of every sale. They are in business to make the most money.

Maybe you disagree, but I think HBD and eBay are both ongoing enterprises. So their better interests are in the 2nd view.

As far as this impacts HBD, none of this has anything to do with anything that matters in this debate, whatever the f**k it is now.

Unless the FA bidding process was changed to a system that I'm sure you and I and everyone who has ever played the game would agree was terrible, the same amount of money is going to be spent on FAs no matter exactly how the process works.

An HBD world is a closed system. An exact amount of money and human players. Can't create more than $180M x 32 in pretend dollars in a world. Can't add a 33rd real person.

So there is going to be a finite amount available to bid on FAs. Because it can't be saved for next year and there are penalties for spending it on something else, about the same percentage of that money is going to be spent on FAs in every world every season. Of course it varies a bit world to world, season to season, for reasons you & I could probably list. But nothing outside of a process that makes bidding super hard or forces pretend players to accept less than near their market value is going to result in less overall FA pretend money being spent.

And even if pretend players did accept less than they do now, that would make the real people would have more pretend money left and they would probably spend that on the FAs that are good, but ask for too much & don't get signed at all or until their demands fall. They'd probably get signed sooner. So even if the top FAs got less, overall FA spending would probably be very close to the same.

I don't care if the top FAs get a bigger or smaller percentage of the FA money. I care that real world people are dropping out of HBD and not being replaced at the same rate.

Thanks for posting your thoughts. We seem to disagree on some fundamental things. Not likely to come to an agreement. Interesting exchange of ideas. Thanks.

You know... I don't know if this is going to be a hijack or what, and this is something I was going to ask about maybe six pages ago but I was too entertained... I'm only in one world. And so far the biggest revelation I've had regarding the evaluation of players is just how much replaceable talent there is, and how many places it can come from. i.e., thinking you scored a decent free agent at the beginning of the season, and seeing far better players on far better teams discarded to the WW.

I don't know if it's just the world I'm in... maybe other worlds are different... but I've gone over the world history, and in this one, virtually any difference-making player never hits free agency. The players who are available in free agency are either disappointments to their previous owners, health risks, or perceived as not being worth their market demands.

In other words, in the world I'm in, free agency does not really seem to be worth arguing about for seven pages.

Short answer(because I could go on forever). We control players for 11 seasons. 4 minimum(with the 20 game hold in play), 2 arb and 5 year contract. If the owner holds the player back 4 seasons(reasonably standard), the player is controlled until 33-37 years of age. Some players are still impact players but they're probably Type A. HBD owners protect their picks like they're beloved treasures. So a lot of them end back up with their original team because no one will give up a high pick and a 5 year deal to a player on the decline.

So, yeah, there aren't that many "difference-makers" in FA. But there are plenty "hole-fillers" that may or may not show up on the WW later in the season. If you're trying to win, you can't take a "wait and see" approach to filling out your roster.

Posted by tecwrg on 10/23/2012 9:17:00 PM (view original):The biggest FAIL in this thread continues to be that tufft thinks that HBD free agency would benefit from proxy bidding.

The second biggest FAIL in this thread is that tufft thinks that people are leaving HBD because of the way the free agency process currently works.

You dug yourself so deep into 1 or 2 details you can't seem to pull out and see the bigger issue.

And the way you word this - "HBD free agency would benefit..." seems to indicate that you, too, care more about the pretend baseball players making the most pretend money than the real humans playing the game.

We disagree that people leave HBD because of how much time it takes to play to compete. My opinion is based on what I've been told & my experience. I don't know what your opinion is based on.

Both Mike & I are on the record (seems we agree on some things) that we don't bother to invite our baseball friends (real baseball, fantasy baseball, etc.) to play HBD because it takes a lot of time. There are other reasons, but that's high on the list.

The FA process is not the one & only reason people are leaving HBD. I never said that. Like Mike, you're starting to make up **** nobody said and argue against it.

FA bidding one of several aspects of game that could be changed to require less time to compete. In any change some things will be lost and some will be gained. Maybe there would be a little less strategy with a different system. Maybe a little more. Certainly some different strategies. IMO, all good tradeoffs if it took less time & didn't require logging in every 4-6 hours, even if nothing happened.

We're done here, right? You disagree with my main point - HBD is loosing players & doesn't have a good system to deal with that - and with what I've proposed as a partial solution - Change the FA system. Can we call it? I'll say you won, if that makes you happy.